Written by Brett Duncan. Brett specializes in helping direct selling companies evolve into modern social selling models while still maintaining the culture and essence of who they are and what makes them different. He is co-founder and managing partner of Strategic Choice Partners, a business development firm that helps direct selling companies take their next steps.
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One of the most dangerous phrases in business is: “That’s how we’ve always done it.”
One of the most confusing phrases is: “This is so much easier now.”
Direct selling companies are constantly launching new things. At corporate, we recognize where there’s friction, complication and frustration, and we set out to do something about it. We streamline our online shopping experience. We simplify our compensation plan. We find ways to reduce clicks and steps. We find ways to get better.
And the field tells us they want all of these things, too. But they so rarely agree with how we go about doing it.
I’ve seen it happen countless times during platform migrations, compensation updates, customer program redesigns, ecommerce upgrades and operational transformations. A company spends months… or sometimes years… fixing a problem. They simplify a process, remove unnecessary steps, eliminate manual work and introduce functionality the field has been requesting for years.
And then the complaints start. Not because the new process is worse. Because it’s unfamiliar.
We like to think people resist bad change and embrace good change. In reality, people often resist unfamiliar change and embrace familiar inefficiency. We’re instinctively drawn to comfort, and resist change. Even when it’s better.
Familiarity Wins. Almost Every Time.
Put another way, success is not acceptance of the new concept; it’s comfort and familiarity with the new way.
Yet, time and time again, we at corporate so rarely account for the time and effort that has to go into transitioning one familiarity in “the way it’s always been” to comfort and familiarity in the “better way.”
The Workaround Becomes the Process
Most direct selling companies have been around long enough to accumulate workarounds. Not because anyone intentionally designed them that way, but because reality happened. The field adapted. Customers behaved differently than expected. Technology failed to keep pace. Consumer preferences evolved. And the salesforce figured out how to make it work (even when corporate couldn’t).
Maybe consultants started placing customer orders on behalf of customers because the customer ordering experience wasn’t ideal. Maybe duplicate accounts became a tolerated reality because fixing them or preventing them was harder than working around them. Maybe a host rewards program evolved into something completely different from its original intent because that’s how customers preferred to engage.
Maybe field leaders developed entire operating systems using spreadsheets, Facebook groups, text messages and personal reminders because the official tools didn’t quite get the job done.
Over time, these workarounds stop feeling like workarounds. They become normal. Eventually, they become invisible.
Nobody even questions them anymore. In fact, no one even thinks of them as “workarounds.” They’re simply how the business works.
Then Someone Fixes the Problem
This is where things get interesting… A company finally modernizes. The customer experience improves. The ordering process becomes simpler. The duplicate account issue gets addressed. The reporting gets cleaner. The manual steps disappear.
Executives are thrilled. The field is annoyed… Which seems completely irrational. After all, the new process is objectively better: fewer clicks, less manual work, cleaner data, better customer experience.
So why is everyone upset? Because the field isn’t comparing the new process to what it was originally supposed to be. They’re comparing it to what they’ve become comfortable doing. Those are very different benchmarks.
Familiar Doesn’t Mean Better
One of the most common mistakes executives make during change initiatives is assuming resistance means the change is flawed.
Sometimes it does. Sometimes the field resists the new thing because the new thing actually doesn’t work that well. But often, resistance simply means people haven’t developed familiarity yet.
Think about it this way. Imagine you’ve been driving the same route to work for ten years. One day, the city builds a new road that cuts ten minutes off your commute. It’s objectively faster, better and more efficient. Yet for the first few weeks, it feels worse. You miss turns. You second-guess yourself. You feel less comfortable.
The old route wasn’t better. It was familiar.
Direct selling organizations encounter this dynamic constantly. The field has already invested years learning the workaround. They’ve already paid the learning curve. They’ve already developed muscle memory around the inefficiency.
Now corporate is asking them to start over. Not because the new process is harder, but because the old process feels easier.
New Consultants See the World Differently
One of the most fascinating things about these situations is how differently new consultants often react.
A longtime leader might say: “I don’t understand why they changed this.”
A brand-new consultant might say: “Wait. You used to do what?”
The veteran sees loss. The newcomer sees simplicity. The veteran sees disruption. The newcomer sees common sense.
That’s an important clue.
Many organizations accidentally design change management around their most experienced users, even when those users have spent years adapting to outdated systems. The company ends up preserving complexity because a subset of people became comfortable with it. More times than not, as team leaders, their real stress lies in having to explain it to their teams.
Meanwhile, new customers and new consultants are looking at the entire process wondering why it was ever designed that way in the first place.
The Real Challenge Isn’t Teaching the New Process
This is where I think many companies get change management wrong.
Most training efforts focus on teaching the new process. That’s necessary, but it isn’t sufficient. The bigger challenge is helping people translate what they already know into the new environment, and, in some cases, helping them understand that some of the things that have become second nature to them is no longer necessary.
Change management should spend a lot more time answering a very simple question: “If you did this before, here’s how you do it now.”
That framing matters because it begins with the behavior people already understand. It acknowledges their existing muscle memory and then gives them a clear bridge from the old way to the new one.
And sometimes the answer is even better: “If you did this before, now you don’t have to.”
That’s the part companies often miss. They train people extensively on what the new system can do without explicitly telling them which old behaviors, extra steps and workarounds can finally disappear. We assume it’s obvious why this better way is, well, a better way. It’s not. We have to show them, and also give them time to process it.
Don’t just announce the new feature. Explain which workaround just became obsolete.
Don’t say: “Here’s the new ordering process.”
Say: “If you used to place customer orders manually because customers struggled with the website, here’s how that’s handled now.”
Or, even better: “If you used to place customer orders manually because customers struggled with the website, you don’t have to anymore. Here’s what the customer can do now instead.”
Don’t say: “Here’s the new reporting dashboard.”
Say: “If you used to download this report every week, clean it up in Excel and combine it with another report, here’s how you accomplish that now.”
And if the new system eliminates those steps entirely, say so:
“If you used to download and clean up that spreadsheet every week, you don’t have to anymore. The system now does it automatically.”
That’s the bridge.
The field doesn’t experience change as a list of new features. They experience it as a disruption to the things they already know how to do. Effective change management connects those two worlds explicitly: Here’s what you did before. Here’s how you do it now. And here’s what you can finally stop doing altogether.
Every Workaround Is Trying to Tell You Something
There is another lesson hiding underneath all of this. Workarounds are not just behaviors. They’re feedback.
Every workaround is evidence that someone was trying to solve a problem. The field rarely creates extra work for fun. If thousands of people developed a similar habit, there’s usually a reason.
The workaround may reveal friction in the customer experience, missing functionality, confusing processes, changing consumer expectations or gaps between corporate assumptions and field reality.
The mistake isn’t having workarounds. The mistake is eliminating them without understanding why they emerged.
Sometimes the workaround should disappear. Sometimes it should become an official feature. The smartest companies investigate before they decide.
Familiarity Is Not a Strategy
Perhaps the biggest takeaway is this:
Familiarity and effectiveness are not the same thing.
Just because a process feels comfortable doesn’t mean it’s optimal. Just because the field has adapted to something doesn’t mean the business should preserve it forever. And just because people complain about a change doesn’t mean the change is wrong.
Sometimes it simply means they’re still learning.
Every successful direct selling company has a history of adaptation. That’s one of the industry’s greatest strengths. The field is remarkably resourceful. When systems fall short, people find ways to keep serving customers and growing their businesses.
But eventually, companies have to decide whether they’re going to keep supporting the workaround or solve the problem that created it.
That’s when leadership becomes difficult. Because the greatest obstacle to improvement is rarely the new idea. It’s the old habit. And in direct selling, old habits have a funny way of disguising themselves as best practices.
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